Published byStanford Medicine

Slate’s Carl Zimmer has a great piece today about replication failure in science and is implications when human health is at issue. He writes:

C. Glenn Begley, who spent a decade in charge of global cancer research at the biotech giant Amgen, recently dispatched 100 Amgen scientists to replicate 53 landmark experiments in cancer—the kind of experiments that lead pharmaceutical companies to sink millions of dollars to turn the results into a drug. In March Begley published the results: They failed to replicate 47 of them.

The solution, Zimmer suggests, may be to outsource the replication of experiments:

Here’s how it is supposed to work. Let’s say you have found a drug that shrinks tumors. You write up your results, which are sexy enough to get into Nature or some other big-name journal. You also send the Reproducibility Initiative the details of your experiment and request that someone reproduce it. A board of advisers matches you up with a company with the experience and technology to do the job. You pay them to do the job—Iorns estimates the bill for replication will be about 10 percent of the original research costs—and they report back whether they got the same results.

School of Medicine Professor John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, is on the Reproducibility Initiative’s advisory board.

One Response to “
How outsourcing might provide solutions to replication failure in research ”

Thanks for the support. We’re very happy to have Professor Ioannidis on the Reproducibility Initiative advisory board. We’d also love to have Stanford School of Medicine core facilities as part of the Reproducibility Initiative validation network.